Studia Aarhusiana Neotestamentica (SANt) – serie

The rise of early Christianity was accompanied by a period of impressive literary production. Early Christian authors combined literary forms from Greco-Roman writings with the style and content of Hellenistic Jewish literature to create a tertium quid. Their literary works are therefore comparable to both Jewish and Greco-Roman contemporary writings, but they adopt, modify and transform literary conventions according to their needs and interests to communicate their message showing signs of literary innovation and creativity. This volume shows the innovative aspect of early Christian literature, by integrating adjacent fields of research as ancient history, classical studies, Jewish studies, patristics and religious studies. The analyses explore how and why early Christian literature unexpectedly established itself as a literary force in the early imperium.

The contributors of this volume demonstrate how a highly developed expertise in interpreting Biblical and cognate literature is a substantial part of the overall discourse on the historical, literary, social, political, and religious dimensions of trauma in past and present. This idea is based on the assumption that trauma is not only a modern concept which derives from 20th century psychiatry: It is an ancient phenomenon already which predates modern discourses. Trauma studies will thus profit from how Theology - specifically Biblical exegesis - and the Humanities deal with trauma in terms of religion, history, sociology, and politics.

Philo of Alexandria and Flavius Josephus are amongst the most influential ancient writers. In his long scholarly career, Per Bilde (1939–2014) published various essays, studies and articles examining early Judaism and the historical Jesus from the angle of the work of Philo and Josephus. Many of the articles contain in-depth treatment of primary sources, and thus are of great value for scholars to come. The studies in this volume have yet been compiled by Per Bilde himself. They are now edited posthumously with contributions from Steve Mason (Groningen) and Mogens Müller (Copenhagen) responding to Bilde's work.

20ths century research in St. Paul is widely impacted by Adolf Deissmann’s prominent view on the apostle as a “homo novus” (1911). But where does this concept originate from, and what does it imply? This collection of articles does not only re-evaluate Deissmann’s concept by tracing it back to its historical and socio-political origins in Cicero and exploring how authors from (early) Imperial Time perceive and transform the homo novus paradigm by diverse modes and strategies of literary self-fashioning. Scholars ranging the fields of New Testament Studies, Greek and Latin Philology, Ancient History, Patristics, and Comparative Literature also examine how the Ciceronian paradigm was early on transformed, disseminated, and applied as a literary concept and an authorial topos of self-molding. One of the leading questions throughout the volume thus is: How do authors like Cicero, Horace, Paul, Tacitus, Seneca, Athanasius, and Augustine fashion themselves in accordance to or in difference from the idea of being a “new man”? It is argued that by means of literary self-configuration, indeed, some of these writers – such as Paul and Augustine – want to appear as “new men” by either altering traditional social, moral, religious, or political roles, or by creating new patterns of social behavior and religious self-understanding.

One of the most fundamental questions when reading and trying to understand New Testament texts is the question of genre. It is impossible to understand a text, its meaning and intention, in its proper historical setting if one does not understand its genre: As an example, interpreting a satirical text without understanding the genre would no doubt lead to grave misunderstandings. The same logic applies to texts from the New Testament, and the matter is complicated even further by the immense historical gap between the time of the genesis of the New Testament canon and now. The problem of the New Testament texts’ genre(s) is therefore a vital area of scholarly discussion within international New Testament scholarship. The current volume utilizes the newest insights from current research on the New Testament to cast new light on the question of the genre of Mark’s Gospel. Here, prominent international New Testament scholars discuss how we should understand the genre(s) of Mark’s Gospel, thus making an important contribution to international scholarship on the Gospel of Mark as well as the Gospel genre in general.

Erich Benjamin Pracht advances scholarship on the Paul of the letters and the Paul of Acts in two ways. First, the author introduces a modern concept of leadership, namely transformational leadership theory, as the lens through which he interprets modeling and remodeling images of Paul. In this way, Pracht takes a major step forward from previous perspectives in the Paul-and-Acts debate, which typically approach the issue by probing the historicity of the Lukan Paul, or by comparing how well the Lukan Paul resembles the Paul of the letters in terms of theological themes, style and language use, or major biographical claims. Second, this study shows that Cicero and Sallust can also be read in terms of modeling and remodeling images of leadership. Accordingly, Pracht undertakes a detailed investigation of this pair of authors to generate perspectives that inform the Paul-and-Acts debate.